Jhumpa has written a memorable book — it rides like a rollercoaster, like waves, making you happy and later hitting you with gut-wrenching truths and secrets. The words flows smoothly, and so does the writing. It’s beautifully descriptive and takes you ahead in the story like warm water down the throat. There are times when the sentences amaze you, wondering how someone can draw such stunning comparisons out of nothing and how much time it must have taken for her to perfect the lines.
My favourite part from the book:
She passes over two pages filled only with the addresses of her daughter, and then her son. She has given birth to vagabonds. She is the keeper of all these names and numbers now, numbers she once knew by heart, numbers and addresses her children no longer remember. She thinks of all the dark, hot apartments Gogol has inhabited over the years, beginning with his first dorm room in New Haven, and now the apartment in Manhattan with the peeling radiator and cracks in the walls. Sonia has done the same as her brother, a new room every year ever since she was eighteen, new roommates Ashima must keep track of when she calls. She thinks of her husband’s apartment in Cleveland, which she had helped him settle into one weekend when she visited. She’d bought him inexpensive pots and plates, the kind she used back in Cambridge, as opposed to the gleaming ones from Williams-Sonoma her children buy for her these days as gifts. Sheets and towels, some sheer curtains for the windows, a big sack of rice. In her own life Ashima has lived in only five houses: her parents’ flat in Calcutta, her in-laws’ house for one month, the house they rented in Cambridge, living below the Montgomerys, the faculty apartment on campus, and, lastly, the one they own now. One hand, five homes. A lifetime in a fist.